18-55mm SLR len attach to iphone

A famous camera hacker Bhautik Joshi, who design the brilliant DIY tilt-shift lens hack, has contributed another great idea. It’s an optical coupler that allows an iPhone to accept a standard SLR lens that known as Phone-O-Scope. Though this DIY modification is not powerful enough but it’s good enough to shoot with and produces very analog (almost Holga-like) results. You also get the advantages of SLR lenses – that is, DOF effects, and the wide range of available focal lengths (i.e. macro to telephoto).

18-55mm SLR len attach to iphone1

The quality captured by this Custom DIY len attach to an iPhone isn’t bad at all. Take a look of a sample below.

Sample of pic captured by iPhone with custom 18-55mm SLR lens attached.

18-55mm SLR len attach to iphone captured photo sample
The image quality issues are caused by two main factors:

1) Optical axis alignment. When the phone, lens stack and SLR lens alignment isn’t good enough that will cause a small alignment errors in the axis – even as little as one or two millimeters – is enough to cause significant portions of the image to become out of focus

2) Image stack lenses used. The lenses are out of a CD player; they’re not perfect magnifiers, and, they’re designed to work with a specific wavelength of light. This is a significant contributor to the chromatic aberration observed.

Well, I think iPhone manufacturer should consider releasing an real SLR lens for their iPhone, because it’s really a good idea to have an SLR lens attached to our iPhone. Maybe in future not only iPhone, the other phone  and smart phone manufacturer like Nokia, Sony Ericson, Samsung, Dopod, HTC will we the first to introduce that extra add on.